“Innocence is a crime,” Igiaba Scego said during our very first class, citing James Baldwin. I have been thinking about these words ever since, perhaps because they have come up regularly throughout the past six weeks. What is meant here by innocence and who gets to claim it? In the context of Italy, innocence may be easily claimed through ignorance. As Barbara Ofosu-Somuah pointed out during our discussions, when confronted with their colonial past, many white Italians tend to use ignorance to protect themselves. “I am not a bad person, I’m just ignorant,” may be a standard response. There is also the other side of the coin: “I know, but I was not responsible, so why should I feel bad about it?”
As a PhD student that studies feminist perspectives on violence in Italy and France, I am fascinated by the form that violence can take and how it is hidden. As someone from Albania, I have always questioned Italy’s relationship to my home country in the framework of its colonial history, both past and present. It seems to me that the relationship between innocence and ignorance is crucial to unpacking Italy’s continuous erasure of its past and present violences.
Through Igiaba Scego’s lectures, we were introduced to the various attempts made by the Italian government to suppress the history of its colonial endeavors, at best relegating it to a sin of its Fascist period. But even that form of acknowledgment is usually limited. It is enough to look at the case of Rodolfo Graziani, a Fascist general responsible for many atrocities in Ethiopia, and the statue erected in his native Affile with public funds as recently as 2012. Or the way Mussolini left his mark on the architecture of Rome, his words adorning, to this day, the monuments built to his empire. But in the attempt to portray Italians as “brava gente,” Italy’s involvement in the horn of Africa or Libya, both before and in the aftermath of World War II, become invisible ghosts. In that case, it is hard to bring to the surface Italy’s colonial crimes, and how their consequences live on in the humanitarian catastrophe that continues to unfold in the Mediterranean. Italy’s response to this crisis can be understood precisely through the alibi of “I am not responsible, so why should I have to deal with it,” a refusal to understand how one’s current wealth and privileges rest on violence and exploitation.
But even the language I am using here feels imprecise: in speaking of Italy’s colonial past, I am putting some distance between Italy—the country, or its government—and its implicated white citizens. And yet if there is one thing that we had the opportunity to investigate with Igiaba—in particular through a wide-ranging bibliography that allowed us to explore the afterlives of empire in both Portugal and Italy—it is precisely the human face of colonialism and the complicated networks of blood and relations that tie us to the past. Whether Zoppe aiding Italians as translators in Adua during World War II, or Attilio Profeti’s past in Ethiopia in Sangue Giusto, colonialism is a family affair. And even the most morally upstanding people (or characters) struggle to reconcile the love they feel for their family members, with the violence they have caused. Love shows the fault lines in our moral commitments, or perhaps it causes them. But it also shows that there is no such thing as an uncompromised person. We are all, if not complicit, at least implicated.
